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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23671258">“take mine.”</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards'>clickingkeyboards</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [73]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(for a good cause), Best Friends, Breaking and Entering, Detectives, Gen, Investigations, Period-Typical Racism, Private Investigators</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:28:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,485</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23671258</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>George and Alexander break and enter for the good cause of a case at the hospital, and have to make a bolt for it after being caught by policemen.</p><p>Canon Era</p><p>Written for the seventy-third prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Alexander Arcady &amp; George Mukherjee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [73]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>“take mine.”</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What are you doing in this office?”</p><p>George swore and turned to see PC Saunders, standing with his arms over his chest, and a gaggle of officers gawking behind him. The moment he suggested it, I knew that breaking into the offices that had been commandeered by the police department for the investigation was a bad idea, but I agreed anyway. At that moment, staring down an officer reaching for his gun, I regretted not voicing how utterly awful I thought the idea was before we broke in.</p><p>Movement out the corner of my eye attracted my gaze, and I saw that George was staring back at me, cueing me to cause a distraction. Seeing his dark eyes peering out of the balaclava pulled over his face was unnerving, and I was reminded of the one pulled over my own head.</p><p>There was no verbal distraction I could cause that wouldn’t result in someone putting a bullet between George’s eyes, so I burst into a hacking cough, doubling over and pressing a hand to my chest, feeling it heave under my hand. All eyes turned to me, and I straightened up gasping after half a minute of forcing myself to cough. When I looked back to George, he had moved further away from me and had raised his hands, surrendering to the officer who had a gun pointed at his head.</p><p>‘What are you doing?’ I mouthed to him, turning my head and moving my lips as slightly as possible. Why was he surrendering? Then my attention was turned to his shoes, watching him take the slightest step back. There was a creak as his back put pressure on the handle of the fire escape, and I finally understood.</p><p>“HASTINGS, RUN!” he yelled, and ducked down, pushing the door open as violently as possible and rocketing down the outside stairs.</p><p>I took his lead, bolting after him and out the door, down the rain-slick steps. The moment I dodged out of the room, I heard a gunshot and something shattering, and I realised that someone had shot a bullet through the window where my head had been two seconds before. I tailed George across the newly-laid paths, around the sharp corner and into the opposing building of the neurology department. As I ran inside, I grabbed the handle of the door that George had violently thrown open and pulled it shut carefully, before bolting up the stairs.</p><p>It was almost completely empty, and the floor-to-ceiling windows offered no protection or shielding for two teenage detectives probably about to die. We ducked behind the only thing that could hide us from the police running across from the main building, a pillar in the waiting room of the department.</p><p>We sat with our backs pressed against it, breathing hard as we heard the police outside curse, “Where did the intruders go? The automatic lights aren’t on it that building!”</p><p>“They must have gone elsewhere, come on!”</p><p>I turned to George. “Why didn’t the automatic lights turn on when we ran in?” I asked, frowning at him and tapping his knee.</p><p>With a grin on his face, he held up a twisted piece of plastic in his left hand. “I tried to hit the switch as we ran in but I ended up ripping it out of the wall.”</p><p>I snorted, tried to hide it, and then broke out laughing. “<em> George </em>!”</p><p>“Sue me, I was in a rush,” he said, laughing too, a hand pressed over his mouth to quiet it.</p><p>“So was I!” I argued pointing towards the door. “I pulled it shut as we ran in.”</p><p>Shrugging, he grinned and said, “Guess we’re both resourceful geniuses. Me more than you, of course.”</p><p>I chuckled and smacked his arm, and we fell silent.</p><p>“They’re going to shoot at us, Alex, when they find us,” he said. “Just a forewarning.”</p><p>“They might not!” I protest, disbelieving that they would shoot at two people that were clearly young. However, George shook his head at me in pity, and I was once again shaken into remembering the disconnect between us.</p><p>“Alex, you have an Indian with you. That’s like signing a piece of paper asking to be shot.”</p><p>“I would argue but you’re annoyingly right, as usual.”</p><p>“It’s part of being a pessimist and a realist, Alex.”</p><p>“Doesn’t it get tiring?”</p><p>“Not really; I’m either right or pleasantly surprised.”</p><p>Footsteps stormed back towards us, and George gripped my knee, digging in his nails. “I need to bolt. If they catch me, they’ll put a round in my head, and then reload and put that second round into my head to make sure I’m dead. You won’t get shot if you’re caught, as we can’t sneak away together because it’ll be way too obvious and we’ll get noticed. Meet me at the tube station, and pretend to be a detective if you’re caught.”</p><p>I nodded, and stripped off my dark overcoat and balaclava, shoving them into his arms. “Hide these somewhere, if you can’t carry them out.”</p><p>“Alright.” He reached out and neatened my suit. “Do you have that badge that they gave us at Weston, after we solved the Houghton case? You can flash the badge if you’re caught.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>Putting a hand in the pocket of his dark overcoat, he said, “Take mine. Good luck, Alex.” With that, he took off down the darkened halls.</p><p>Straightening myself up, I pocketed the detective ID and slipped out of the building. Astonishingly, I wasn’t caught by the policemen rampaging around trying to find a pair of intruders, but I gripped the badge as hard as I could as I walked off the grounds of the hospital. George was crouching on a wall outside the gate. “Good job, Alex.”</p><p>“Thanks, George,” I said. “How did you get out?”</p><p>“Ran out the back, dodged the cops, scaled a fence,” he told me in a frank tone. “Your hand is bleeding.”</p><p>I looked at it and he was right: my hand had been deeply lacerated, and I realised that I had gripped the badge so hard that my hand had been cut. “Sorry. I’ve probably covered your badge in blood.”</p><p>“It’s no problem,” he said. “Makes it more realistic, doesn’t it?”</p><hr/><p>The following morning, we were both shattered. Although our trip was not wasted, and we had a thick roll of documents stashed inside George’s wardrobe, I did wish that we had got more sleep.</p><p>“Morning, boys,” Harold said as we traipsed into the dining room, waving the paper at us. “There’s an update on that ‘Dreadful Death From Dysentry’ that we saw in the papers the other day.”</p><p>“Ooh, go on,” George said, sitting down opposite him and leaning forward in interest. As usual, he looked perfectly pressed, hair slicked back with Brilliantine and jacket sharp, stiff-collared shirt buttoned all the way up.</p><p>“Well, it was discovered yesterday that it was arsenic poisoning! And at the birthday party of the Honourable Daisy Wells, no less,” he commented, reading down the columns with his face growing more surprised. “‘Although suspicion was initially placed on Lord Hastings, the killer was found to be Stephen Bampton, a school friend of The Honourable Albert Wells who was spending Easter with them. Denis Curtis, the victim, has been found to be a fraudulent antiques collector, who cheated Bampton’s family out of all of their belongings years ago and caused Bampton’s father to commit suicide. He has been put in custody in the local police station and will face trial in the summer. As the murder has been commented on, Albert Wells and his relationship with the killer has been heavily scrutinised since the news broke yesterday morning. As one investigator put it, the relationship is rumoured ‘to put it mildly, to be unnatural’, though this has been adamantly denied by—’”</p><p>“And that is quite enough of that!” Mangaldas announced, walking into the room and plucking the newspaper from his hands. “We don’t need to hear about relationships of that nature in this household, do we?”</p><p>Harold started and nodded, voice tight and thick with something as he said, “No, Dad. We don’t.”</p><p>“Anyway!” he said, sitting down at the head of the table and smiling down at all of us. “I’ve just received the most astonishing phone call from the hospital! Apparently, there was a break-in last night, two hooligans wearing all-black rifling through the offices that the police have commanded. All that’s known about them is that one of them is called ‘Hastings’.”</p><p>I choked on nothing.</p><p>“Did they steal anything?” Harold asked, reaching out one hand for the newspaper and slowly tugging it across the table towards himself, peering down at the article.</p><p>“It’s not known yet, but they don’t think so,” Mangaldas said, frowning. “George, what do you think about that?”</p><p>His mouth quirked up into a smile, and he caught my eye. “Fancy that.”</p>
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